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Anniversary Forum
Science and Environmental History
Edmund Russell
| SINCE ITS INCEPTION, environmental history has embraced science as a tool because it provides a useful way to understand nature. Donald Worster has been one of the most forceful advocates for this strategy; a seminal essay he published in 1984 carries the title "History as Natural History."1 But a look at environmental histories reveals that science's role is smaller than we might expect. In some cases, historians have explicitly demoted science by asserting that it is "just another cultured way of knowing." In others, historians have asserted the importance of science in introductions but then relied little on it in the text. This pattern is unfortunate because it means our analyses are not as informed and rich as they could be. This essay focuses on potential reasons for this pattern and suggests ways to change it.2 |
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First, science's demotion. Science's star has fallen among historians as cultural studies, postmodernism, and science studies have risen in prominence. These approaches have undermined the claim that science provides objective truth. To some extent this criticism has been valid, for objectivity may be an admirable goal but a deuced hard one to achieve (if we can even define it). But to some extent the criticism has tilted at straw men and women. The view of scientists as monolithic, hidebound, and unaware of the social nature of their endeavor is rooted more in popular perception than in science itself. The scientists of my acquaintance are keenly aware that society shapes science, if for no other reason than because they rely on government grants to fund their research. |
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But their appreciation is deeper than that. One of the first readings assigned in my first graduate ecology course was Thomas Kuhn's The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, the book that popularized the idea that science underwent radical paradigm shifts as new ideas replaced old.3 It was no great leap to recognize that, if Kuhn was right, today's theories would be overthrown in the future—an effort in which the professor encouraged us to enroll. Another professor emphasized that everything he learned in graduate school about the most basic "facts" of plant physiology had since been found faulty. In seminars, graduate students and faculty in science critique the work of the famous and not-so-famous with as much fervor as historians. |
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So scientists are keen (whether because of intellectual curiosity or careerism) to come up with ideas that challenge accepted theories and "facts." They see revision of current understanding not as a flaw but as the goal of their work. At the same time, they demand rigorous testing of ideas against data, which undermines the claim that science is "just another cultured way of knowing." It is cultured, it tries to be objective but falls short, and scientists are as prone to failings as other people. But using "just" fails to credit science's higher standard of evidence compared to some other ways of knowing. We should not accept scientific ideas uncritically, nor should we dismiss them out of hand. Instead, we should recognize the trove of knowledge about the natural world science has created and use it with the same critical distance we apply to other sources. |
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If we accept the idea that we should use science, why do we not always follow through? This takes us to practical barriers. The most important seems to be the perception that science is beyond historians, either because of a lack of talent or lack of training. It is true that science demands more quantitative skill than does history, that such talent is distributed unevenly in the population, and that more than one historian has emerged from schooling with a sense of not having stood at the front of the line when the knack for numbers was handed out. |
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